


Rainbow Dreams and Fine Lines

by meowvelous



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 11:38:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6752440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meowvelous/pseuds/meowvelous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nadine’s life is full of color, until it drains away. A look at the girl who left her dreams behind, only to return to them later.</p><p>(A stand-alone story, looking at the life of one girl, and what kind of past might shape her into a dream architect.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rainbow Dreams and Fine Lines

Nadine, it seems, spends her childhood drawing. Heaven is a fresh pad of paper, and a new deluxe box of crayons, the kind with a sharpener on the back. She loves color, loves taking the brightest ones and changing the page from white to an explosion of different colors.

Her first real memory, the clear one that sings out in her mind, is of her, her brother Rand, and his best friend Alex. They’re all lying on their stomachs on the ground in her room, against the shiny wood floor and woven white carpeting. For some reason, they lie in a loose circle, all facing each other, with a box of crayons in the center.

Rand is a determined drawer, tongue poking out, making thick lines as he tries to faithfully recreate their family in crayon.

Alex is all energy, big swoops of red and orange and yellow across the page, drawing fire and the vehicles he saw in a cartoon.

Nadine is choosing each color carefully, trying to capture the feel of a castle of clouds, the kind she dreams about at night.

Logically, Nadine knows that this gleaming memory was probably a brief moment. Soon, Rand would get frustrated and Alex would get bored, and both would run outside to play. But in her mind, this moment stretches across the entire afternoon, golden and warm.

Soon, they grow up, and Nadine is the only one left drawing. Rand can’t draw well enough to suit him, and so gives it up. Alex was never much of an artist; it was only a brief distraction for him, like so many of his childhood hobbies.

But Nadine doesn’t mind, because then there’s rainy (snowy, hail-y) afternoons, where Rand and Alex play racing video games, while Nadine curls up on the corner of the bed and draws, dreamily. She loves being alone, and being with other people at the same time, but it doesn’t occur to her that she should treasure these afternoons.

Because then, Rand and Alex go off to school, and she stays at home. They spend their day doing math, and looking at letters, and catching frogs (snails, crickets, grasshoppers) at recess. She spends the day drawing in her room, alone, feeling like a ghost that’s been forgotten.

Even after Nadine enters the education system, abandoned by her mom in a classroom full of smiling strangers and plastic blocks, she’s somehow fallen behind her brothers (and that’s how she thinks of Alex, no matter how often her teacher tries to explain the difference between being related and not). At recess, she tries to approach them. Rand may favour her with a smile, but soon he runs off after Alex, out of her reach.

Eventually, she makes her own friends, with two girls named Carrie and Shia. Carrie makes them play family, while Nadine squirms in her chair, wishing she could go and finger-paint at the easel, but too shy to disobey her newly obtained, self-proclaimed big sister.

Despite being exposed to Alex at a young age, it still takes Nadine time to adjust to other children. Letters and numbers too, are a mystery to her, inconceivably dull when compared to bright paint spread across paper. She avoids being taught, seeking art instead, and ends up labelled incorrectly and placed in a new classroom with other students who learn differently.

It’s Rand who saves her, as he often will throughout her life. He knows her mind nearly as well as she does, knows how stubborn she can be, and one Christmas break, he patiently finds cue cards that associate pictures with letters. Then Nadine gets it, that A can be red and means apple.

When her parents start to buy her picture books, with bright glossy pages and pictures of things she’s never seen before, Nadine falls in love all over again. Soon, she’s sneaking over to the book shelf instead, fingers seeking out a familiar book about a big red dog (Red is her favourite color, for a long, long time, until her parents die in a car crash, and then red is too much).

But soon she circles back to drawing, big ambitious pictures of jungles and lions, inspired by the picture books. Everyone rejoices, thinking she will have a future in writing, but Nadine never bothers to put words alongside her pictures, because the images are enough for her. 

It’s only once she reaches first (second, third, fourth, fifth) grade that Nadine realizes what freedom she had when she was younger, and she misses it. Learning to read longer books is a struggle again, once the pictures are gone, replaced by white pages and black type.

The only way she manages is by getting Rand to read to her, so she can close her eyes and imagine all the colors and scenes that should be taking place on the pages. But soon Rand is too busy with his own schoolwork, so Nadine has to read to herself, going slowly through the words.

She draws more after this, hurrying through her work so she can do what she cares about instead. Crayons give way to markers, and then pencil crayons, and then pastels. Paint is sadly left behind, until middle school, when art classes remind her of how well a paint brush fits into her hand.

After that, Nadine begs her parents to be able to repaint her room, and develops a brief obsession with collecting paint chip samples. In the end, each wall is a different color; green, purple, red, and teal. She picks white soft curtains, but gets new rugs for the floor. Her bed sheets are never white, shifting through as many colors as she can extract from their linen closet.

And then their parents die in a car crash.

Rand misses his soccer game, sitting in the waiting room, and Nadine finds she hates the bright red staining her parent’s bandages but she hates the white hospital walls even more.

Middle school graduation seems unimportant, when compared to their new guardians, and the fights Rand has with them. He’s nearly eighteen, and this means they can’t do very much about it when he disappears with Alex.

Nadine becomes a ghost once more. She doesn’t protest about her new bedroom walls, painted a pastel yellow, because everything seems to be fading from her life anyway. With the family photos, Nadine shuts away her art supplies, and picks up a pencil instead.

Her high school years are catalogued in a series of sketchbooks, soft grey lines, sometimes outlined in black. Carrie and Shia are still there for her, but now more than ever, Nadine feels she’s just playing the role Carrie made for her, while wishing she could be somewhere else.

It’s in the last year, towards the start, when Rand saves her again.

When she leaves the school one afternoon in the autumn, he’s there, with bright yellow hair and a wonderfully green pea coat. It’s a brief visit, mainly him apologizing for leaving, and then apologizing for not being able to stay. But Rand is okay, and he’s still with Alex, and that’s enough for Nadine.

But then she sees him more, and one day he shows up outside the house in his car. Rand takes her for trips into the city, full of people and so many different colors. It’s too much for her, so instead they wander through museums and look at a lot of buildings.

Rand, always meticulous, always perfect, has a sudden interest in architecture. And when Nadine sees the city through his eyes, she learns to love it too. There’s something reassuring about carved grey stones, solid and unobtrusive, and yet so beautiful. She feels less like a ghost when she presses her hands against stone walls and doesn’t pass through them.

As the end of high school draws near, everyone urges her to pick university, but only Rand tells her to learn about what she loves. And so in art class, her anatomy sketches change; instead of the arch of a foot, she draws the arch of a doorway; rather than the curve of a spine, she draws the curve of a bridge. Like when she was little, Nadine draws buildings, but not from dreams, from reality instead.

She applies to a school known for their architecture program, in New York City. The only one not surprised is Rand; he buys her guide books of the big city, and goes apartment hunting for her, to find a place to suits her.

Nadine never thinks to ask him where he got the money for the loft from; she’s too distracted by the long panes of glass, the buttery wooden floor, the spiraling iron staircase. She shares it with art students, for the company and companionship, because they seem to understand her more than Carrie or Shia ever did.

Soon, she no longer shies away from color when she comes home to her roommates painting; bright splashes of color across their canvases, following no rhyme or reason. But still, Nadine prefers stone and glass, wires and supports, because she’s left castles made of clouds behind her, like so much from her childhood.

(And it almost seems ridiculous when a man with a shiny silver suitcase enters her life, and asks her to build in dreams, not from them. But working in dreams gives her perfect control over the buildings and environment, and she understands how Rand got drawn into this world when he lost control of his own life. Her first dreamscapes are cities, entirely in monochrome, until she gets coaxed into reproducing environments, details, and fairgrounds that combine steel and color.)

**Author's Note:**

> ...and yeah, that's all I wrote. Originally wrote this back in 2010, and always had a soft spot for it, so I figured I might as well let it see the light of day. Title is taken from a fanmix title back in the day.


End file.
